Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 12, English (Old Version)

Summary: Great recognition accuracy if you get past the installation troubles, find a headset that works and train the software well. It is very good when you need a lot of technical or custom vocabulary. The software itself is horribly unstable and clunky, crashes too often. For casual texts such as regular emails or office text, the voice recognition that comes inbuilt with Android smartphones is way superior for the English language - it comes free (look for the microphone symbol on your onscreen keyboard), doesnt require training and is amazingly accurate for standard texts without special vocabulary. I use that for emails. In Detail: I am using the software on windows 7 (64 bit). After putting in some effort into the initial training, the voice recognition engine works very well and Im very happy with and positively surprised about the accuracy. The premium version has the advantage that custom words can be imported, which is convenient if you have a lot of custom vocabulary such as field names in a database. In regards to the recognition quality a couple of things turned out to be helpful: I tried a Logitech USB headset as well as a Plantronics 300 desktop microphone which Dragon both declined to use (insufficient voice quality). Finally I had more luck using a Plantronics Bluetooth headset with noise cancellation that I usually use with my cell phone. When I created my first user profile and started dictating, Dragon would not understand some common commands however hard I tried, which was very frustrating at first. At some point I simply deleted the profile and started from scratch, this time spending more time training the software to my voice. Besides the quick start training I read out an additional half hour of training text and also let it learn my writing style and vocabulary from my sent emails. After this it became very usable and the recognition accuracy now is great. However, the software has major drawbacks: the installation is a pain and during use Dragon is unstable and tends to crash occasionally. The usability in this regard is horrible and if I had found any feasible competitor for a Windows system, I would not be using Dragon. It is really that annoying. Installation: the installation process crashed, until I found the reasons by lenghty googling. Firstly, Data Execution Prevention had to be disabled for Dragon and its installer. Having Windows 7 on the market for so many years and this still being an issue for Dragon is surprising to me. Secondly, I had to disable User Account Control completely for the installation to succeed, afterwards I could re-enable it. Seriously? Training: the Dragon Dictation explicitly says it supports Windows Live Mail to train a user profile with ones sent emails, so I downloaded all my email via IMAP from the server into the current version of WLM. However no matter what I tried,Dragon crashed during the training process without giving any error or reason.Subsequently I tried it with Outlook 2010, which is supposedly supported by Dragon as well. It crashed here too !! Maybe it couldnt handle the fact that I was using three different email accounts, who knows. I resolved that after several hours of trying by copying my email from the three different (completely downloaded) sent folders in my IMAP accounts over into the one main Sent folder Outlooks has locally. It seems the software can only handle use scenarios from 1995. Daily use: while it is possible to directly dictate into Microsoft Word, with any other unsupported software a pop-up window comes up into which the text is dictated first (Dragons dictation box). Only when the transfer button is clicked, the text gets inserted into the current cursor position. Most software Im using is unsupported, so I have to deal with this dictation box most of the time. The dictation box is unstable and crashes too frequently for my liking. After having dictated a couple of paragraphs it occasionally crashes and with this it loses any dictated work that had not been transferred to the application. So I am trying to remember to transfer my dictated text every one or two paragraphs. These crashes are a big issue for me. After installation the default setting is that text will not be kept in the clipboard when one clicks the Transfer button. If the insertion process in the the application of use fails, the dictated text is lost as well. At least this can be prevented by selecting an option to keep transferred text in the clipboard after the dictation box is closed, But I only found out after googling around for a while. To sum it up: With some effort into the training, the voice recognition is superb. The software itself is buggy, sluggish, and loses dictated work in its regular crashes. The installation process requires sophisticated IT skills and plenty of googling to succeed. If I could avoid the software, I definitely would. For casual use such as emailing or writing simple text, the voice-recognition inbuilt into Android phones is much easier to use, doesnt crash, comes free and works very very well - without training. If you need a lot of custom vocabulary or deal with technical texts on Windows, I - unfortunately - havent found any alternative to Dragon.

The microphone which was included with the product is either junky or defective because the Dragon Naturally Speaking Premium 12 software reports it as not being good enough quality to get past the initial setup/configuration steps. I also had serious quality problems not being able to get it to transcribe recorded files even thought I followed the steps to train the software. The accuracy was horrendous. There are also some feature limitations which are not apparent or obvious on their website if you are a first-time user like myself. If you are already familiar with their past software there would probably be fewer surprises (although unless the older software works better than this one I doubt you would be upgrading anyway.

I am shocked at how well this works! I bought it because I was diagnosed with Lyme disease, which causes a great deal of pain especially for me in my hands. This makes typing very difficult. My voice is kind of nasally and sounds awful on VoIP so I thought Dragon Naturally Speaking might not work for me. I was very wrong. Right off the start it was nearly perfect. With a few hours of voice training, which it does daily at a set time using any work I have done with it, Dragon has my voice patterns down and does not miss a word I say! I am very satisfied with this product. How difficult it was to learn? There are simple easy to follow instructions and help that made learning this software easy for me. I literally jumped right in. Installation was very simple and straight forward, I just put the disk in and selected the .exe file then I followed the simple instructions. It was done in no time and ready to go.

Why oh why do you have to buy headphones with this software? They didnt work well (at all) and the $40 set from Best Buy (which I had to get to use the software at all) worked fine. Drop the headphones and sell the software as a digital download. Good software, dumb packaging. That is why I removed 2 stars - very annoying user experience due to somebody being convinced that their users would be too dumb to get a decent set of headphones - solved by them getting bad headphones for everyone... opportunity knocks. :- )

Started using Dragon over 10 years ago when as a court stenographer I needed a method to help with my typing. It took time to train the software and it worked pretty good. Over the years I upgraded to Dragon Level 10 and it had improved significantly. I bought the 12 Premium and it was not an improvement in my view, and recently purchased the 12 Professional and it still does not meet my standards. Simple words continue to be a problem when you dictate an, you get and, dictate on and you one, and on and on and on. I wonder how it operates with those who are neither as articulate nor enunciate clearly? Dragon gets away with it madness because its the only club in town, but its customer service really suffers because there is none and companies that depend upon computers to interact with human beings as their only line of resolving problems with their product will eventually fail. Dragon sucks every penny it can from its consumers by charging outrageous fees for live tech help when the free time ends (and thats when the system fails due to some software problem). Those who are physically challenged cannot find an alternative source, and I pray one will arise soon.

I have only been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for a few weeks now, but I am thoroughly satisfied with it. It was very easy to install and the training period was easy to get through. I have been using it for a variety of tasks. The primary reason for which I purchased it was to be able to dictate manuscripts for books and I was surprised at how easy and accurate it is to use. In fact, this review is being dictated through that same program. The number of mistakes that the program makes is far fewer than I had anticipated. Quite a few years ago I had used an earlier version of Dragon and was satisfied with it at the time, but there is no comparison between that version and the present one as far as ease-of-use and accuracy are concerned. I am very much satisfied with what I received.

Ive set this software up on several computers. If the user follows the guidelines that are clearly laid out for setting up voice recognition, it works just fine. I will add that the majority of people I know dont use it enough to fully understand how it functions. They dont spend enough time with it to master it. They get frustrated and set it aside. Another example of exercise bike software - it is capable of great things, but ends up in the corner collecting dust due to user apathy.

I found the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software easy to use. But it takes much patience to wait for it to type. You have to speak slowly so that it understands you. I feel like I can type much faster than the speed at which they system types. I use it when my carpal tunnel gets to be too painful. It is a good program to fall back on when my hands become too tire. I have to learn to be more patient with the slower speed at which the softwaret types.

I purchased one and it would not install. I returned and got another one and it would not install on my Dell desktop. I have been using Dragon for more than 10 years and this is the first time I have had this problem.however, I use Dragon all the time and it is fantastic even though I am still using version 10

Cut my writing down by 50% because I dont have to go back and correct everything I write. Only thing I had to get used to ,was thinking in complete sentences, which when youre typing, you tend not to do. Do always go through the training exercises it suggests, and learn how to use it by reading what it is capable of, and how to do it. That way, you get full benefit from the software. Be warned it is VERY resource hungry, so throw the fastest processor and at LEAST 4GB of memory at it, otherwise it will frustrate you.